The following interview was held in Manchester, UK in June 2004. Gavin MacDonald is a journalist and contributor to many comics-related magazines.

GM

Can you tell me a bit about your two new books. Rules is a postcard compilation of older material, much like the earlier Joy compilation. Is there some kind of theme running through the works selected?

DS

Well, the postcard book is just a kind of greatest hits I suppose, things that make nice postcards, so there’s not really any criteria. It’s more just an invention of the publisher.

I’m not really selling it, am I?

GM

So there’s no special significance to the title?

DS

Not really, to be honest. Rules just seemed like a nice title.

GM

Proportionally there’s a lot more text in ‘Kill Your Pets’ than in your other books.

DS

It was originally published by a German publisher as a really limited edition, and I just did it really quickly over a period of about a couple of weeks.

GM

With a big pen?

DS

With a big pen, and a small sketchbook, and that was really my criteria. I just thought I’d do something a bit different, and write statements. I wrote loads and loads of these statements in big pen with a broad nib. It seemed to work alright, so I sent it to this German publisher and he quite liked it, so he published it, and then the Redstone Press who publish my stuff in London decided they thought it was good too, which was kind of a surprise, because I thought it was a bit of an ‘artist’s book’ in a way.

GM

What do you mean, ‘artist’s book’?

DS

I suppose an artist’s book are when artists make artworks as books, and they’re not really the kind of thing that a mainstream publisher would want to publish. They’re a bit ‘arty’ for want of a better adjective. It thought it was bit ‘arty’, and I didn’t think Redstone press would be interested in it, but they were.

GM

But you are an artist.

DS

Yes, I suppose I should really be doing something arty. If anyone’s going to do anything arty, its going to be me, isn’t it.

GM

I want to go back to one of the two books you published last year, ‘Who I Am and What I Want’. It’s been described as autobiographical, but from what I’ve seen the little Shrigley avatar in the pictures doesn’t look anything like you. He has long dark hair and a big nose, and from what I can tell from the photographs I’ve seen of you, you don’t.

DS

Yeah, I don’t look like that. I suppose it’s not really autobiographical, rather mock-biographical. Those aren’t the things that I am or want.

GM

It’s certainly more coherent and structured than your other collections.

DS

Yes, I want to work with narrative a bit more. The two small A6 books, ‘Human Achievement’ and ‘Who I Am and What I Want’, are an attempt to do something with narrative.

GM

There’s definitely a progression in terms of narrative between those two books.

DS

There was a conscious decision to try and make something that had a real structure to it, but even then, the device that I used to make a structure was just that little man, you know. It’s fairly amateurish.

GM

Getting back to the business of being ‘arty’, you’re as prolific an exhibitor as you are published. Do you consider yourself more of an exhibiting artist or a producer of books.

DS

I guess I consider myself as both, really, but I think my work probably works better in books. Small black and white drawings work better in books. I kind of see them as the same thing in a way. I like people to experience the work as a book, and sometimes as an exhibition too, but generally speaking if I had to be judged on my oeuvre, as it were, I’d probably like people to look at my books.

GM

It strikes me that the books, although collections, will naturally be pieced together and received by readers as coherent statements, whereas viewing the same images on the walls of a gallery might make consider them in isolation.

DS

I guess so. I suppose there’s always a problem with what point of access people have to galleries. Sometimes people perceive the experience of walking into a gallery or museum as quite intimidating. People often aren’t sure how to react, whether or not they can just wander around and have their own opinions. They feel like they perhaps need to have some particular intellectual response.

GM

Books are a more personal experience in any case.

DS

Well, everyone’s familiar with how to read a book; you can do it whilst on the bus or whatever. I guess I just like the accessibility of a book versus the art gallery.

GM

The overwhelming effect I receive from your work, above everything else, is laughter. Your drawings make me laugh, and that sets your work apart from the way I receive most contemporary art. What role do you think humour should have in art.

DS

A lot of contemporary art has humour to it, I don’t think it’s a new phenomena. People say that the work of artists like Maurizio Cattelan, which is quite overtly humourous, is something to do with postmodernism, but I don’t really think it is.

GM

Your humour is very accessible though: a lot of humour in art is quite heavily coded.

DS

I suppose so, but my work functions as cartoons and comic books. It can function in exactly the same way as Gary Larson or something like that.

GM

So you’re quite comfortable with the idea of being thought of as a cartoonist or a humourist.

DS

It doesn’t bother me at all. I do illustration, and the books that I make aren’t necessarily supposed to be in the art section. I don’t know what section they’re meant to be in exactly. I think they’re maybe supposed to be beside the till.

GM

There are many pieces where you have exchanges between characters here you display a keen ear for dialogue, dialogue of a particular sort – reminiscent of the kind of circular, futile exchanges of the absurdist playrights like Beckett, or Pinter. Do you draw on sources like that?

DS

Probably, yeah. I wouldn’t say I was influenced by Beckett or Pinter exactly, but I find literature a richer source than contemporary art. I read quite a lot, but I’m not exactly thinking of absurdist theatre when I’m writing these little vignettes. But they are vignettes nonetheless.

GM

You’ve said that you’re trying to work more with narratives, but the individual pieces you’ve always done do consititute little narratives in themselves; they’re not just tableaux.

DS

I like that; I want to make structure. I suppose these little beings are a starting point for that. The way I create them, I just sit down , have a cup of coffee and away I go. I have these funny little conversations in my head and I write them down sometimes. Sometimes they’re interesting, and sometimes they’re not.

GM

So the way you work is quite spontaneous?

DS

Yeah, but I’m quite rigourous in terms of how I go about it. I spend X amount of hours a day, and if I’m not feeling inspired I tend to write myself a list of things to do and then just do it. I just try and put the hours in.

GM

Can I ask how much work you discard?

DS

I discard a lot, and an increasingly larger amount. There’s probably about 40 pages in ‘Kill Your Pets’ and I maybe produced 300. If you make the kind of work I do for 8 Hours a day, 5 days a week, you do tend to go through quite a lot of paper after a while.

GM

So you treat it as a nine-to-five?

DS

It’s more then a career for me, it’s a vocation, it’s what makes me happy, but I try to work hard, you know, to get things done. It’s not a chore or anything though. It’s the best job in the world.

GM

Are there any cartoonists you’d cite as influences?

DS

Not really. I’ve never been interested in comic art, I rarely ever set foot in Forbidden Planet, to be honest. However I have discovered this one cartoonist recently, called Rory Hayes. He’s from the sixties, a Zap! Comics artist; I’m kind of into him because he really couldn’y draw. He worked in a comic book shop and hung about with the likes of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton in San Francisco, and he was just this guy who was cross-eyed and couldn’t draw. Gary Arlington, who published a lot of his work, just felt sorry for him. He used to do all these renderings of fifties ‘Tales From The Crypt’ comics, but they’re really badly done and a bit weird as well. And they’re incredibly obscure and difficult to find. I suppose when you have influences it’s probably quite good when they’re incredibly obscure, because then no-one can accuse you off ripping them off.

GM

Your narratives have always reminded me a little of Mark Beyer.

DS

I know who he is, and I would probably profess to liking his work, but then again I don’t actually have any of it. What I’ve seen I think is really interesting, though. I like Gary Panter as well, I think he’s really interesting, but I think they both come from a background of liking comics. I’ve always been more into music and football.

GM

The only football reference I can think of in your work is the drawing which shows a Good versus Evil football match; a nil-nil draw but Evil wins on penalties after extra time.

DS

Football and art shouldn’t mix as far as I’m concerned. Football is my recreation, it’s everything that art isn’t.

GM

I believe your art degree was in some sort of civic or public art. How did you end up producing cartoons?

DS

What I studied had a public art bias to it, but I still got a degree in Fine Art. I still made pictures. I did continue to make public art after I left art school, little bits of signage and interventions outside that I documented as photographs. But I guess ultimately they just became photographs.

GM

Picking through your work, there seems to be a current of cynicism about art itself. I’m thinking of images like ‘Artists Talk About Their Work’, or ‘Contemporary Art’ in ‘Do Not Bend’.

DS

I guess so. At the time I did the drawing ‘Artists talk about their work’ it was before I was successful as an artist, so maybe there’s a slight bitterness in there.

GM

Have you abandoned that bitterness now?

DS

Obviously I’m rather successful as a contemporary artist now, so I’m not bitter any more.

GM

Your subject matter tends to be quite uncomfortable, dark even, though with a certain lightness of touch that’s perhaps a result of the medium or the simplistic style. Do you ever see yourself doing anything less dark?

DS

I don’t think I can. I don’t even think of what I do as that dark to be honest. It could be darker. It could always be darker.

GM

So you’ve done two music videos in the last six months or so, Good Song for Blur and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s Agnes – Queen of Sorrow. Are any more on the cards?

DS

I’m doing another animated film, but it’s not a pop promo. I don’t know, I probably don’t think I’ll do any more pop promos for a while because I think there’s a limit to how many people are going to want some crappy animations. I think it’s a bit of a leap outside the MTV realm, because they always want images of the artist singing. Although I did lip-sync Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in a very crude way. It’s so badly done you almost notice that it was. Anyway, I probably won’t do any more pop promos because I probably won’t get asked.

I’m working on an animated version of Who I Am And What I Want at the moment. It’ll be ten minutes long, and one of my friends is doing the soundtrack for it. I’ve done the narration for it, but I don’t think that it will end up with my voice on it. This film is the next step in the development of both my animation and my narrative. The pop promos are only 3 minutes long, and I guess the structure is already there in the song; the new film will be much more of an exercise in presenting a story. There’s a lot more creative decisions which I will have to make.

GM

You’ve also produced an animation of one of your drawings for Channel Four: What Happens After You’re Dead from ‘Do Not Bend’.

DS

I did that with Shynola, the same people that I did the video for Good Song with. It was actually the first bit of animation I ever did, although it wasn’t me who really did it. I think I just faxed in the drawing and then this really nice animation came back.

I’m also doing these weekly animations for the BBC website.

GM

Are you actually doing the animation on those?

DS

No, my girlfriend does the animation in Flash. In fact, she did the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy video.

GM

Did you work with either Blur or Will Oldham personally?

DS

Not really. In the case of Good Song, Shynola had worked on the previous Blur video and they’d liked it, which gave us carte blanche to do what they wanted. It was the third single from the album, and we figured they’d be prepared to take a little risk. EMI hated it, didn’t like the idea, didn’t like the finished product, and told us we had to change this, this and this, but Damon was adamant that we could do whatever we wanted.

GM

The story of the video is quite tragic, the squirrel mistaking his woodland fairy lover’s head for a tasty acorn.

DS

It happens though, doesn’t it? (Chuckles) I thought it so it must have happened.

GM

Did the record company raise an eyebrow over the leaf blower at the end of the video, which cheerfully walks all over the last thirty seconds of the song?

DS

Yes, EMI had some real problems with that.

GM

I bet they did.

DS

Again, though, Damon called the shots. I guess he’s so financially viable to them that he can do whatever he wants, and he did, so all credit to him. He basically told them they had to leave everything in, exactly as we’d done it.

GM

That’s fantastic support.

DS

It was cool. I do think they had to make another version without the twin towers in thought. The second to last shot in the original video is of the leaf blower deflecting a plane as it approaches the World Trade Centre.

GM

That’s not the version I’ve been able to stream on-line.

DS

Yeah, well that’s hardly surprising. I do think that was the only concession that was made though. If you come and see me talk about my work, I always show the version with the twin towers, which some people are quite aghast with.

GM

Did you have carte blanche when you were working on the video for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy?

DS

Yeah, it was carte blanche because Domino Records basically paid me virtually nothing for the video, and I did it because I’m a really big Will Oldham fan. I guess I would have done it for nothing. Instead I did it for next to nothing.

GM

It’s quite different in tone to your other work, much lighter, more lovey-dovey. Almost pastoral.

DS

I guess so. Strangely, even though it was such a small record compared to the Blur one, Will Oldham sent a video he had made of him miming the song in a duet with a glove puppet that was either Agnes or an Agnes substitute. I was told I would have to use that footage as part of the video, because without having the artist singing it would never get on MTV. I said, “Listen, if you use that footage, regardless of what I do alongside it it is never going to get on MTV”. So eventually they asked me if I would animate Will, and that’s what I did.

I wrote the script for the video, as I’m quite familiar with the song and Will Oldham’s music generally. We only had ten days to produce it in flash, as opposed to twelve weeks for the Blur video, which is the reason it’s so spare. To be honest with you, if we’d had more time, we’d have done it with a different programme. The punctuation in it is pretty clumsy, but then my work is pretty clumsy so it fits into what I do formally. It’s perhaps a lot more reverential than it needed to be, but the timescale was so short and the budget so small that we had to cut our suit to fit out cloth.

For me it had a kind of absurdity to it that was enough; I didn’t want any bloodshed in this one. There was enough bloodshed in the Blur video.

GM

Do you get tired of being described as faux-naïve?

DS

I don’t really get tired of anything to be honest. I just ignore it if I’m not happy with it. It’s perhaps not the best description of my work though; I do what I do in the way that I do it because it’s a process of reduction. I’m just trying not to do certain things, rather than being faux-naïve. I’m just not interested in rendering spatial relationships. I’m drawing in the most immediate, simple way that I can in order to communicate the things I want to communicate.

But my drawings are quite childish really. Well, they’re very childish. But I think they’re better than kid’s drawings. I guess.